Tuesday, March 27, 2007

One of the hundreds of thousands wounded, maimed or slain in Iraq since March, 2001: Mohammed Abdullah, a 1 year old boy injured by occupying forces in Ramadi (AP photo by Ali Ahmedh - http://www.thewe.cc/weplanet/news/americas/us/welcome_to_war.html )

As we witness the fourth anniversary of the War in Iraq, Alexander Cockburn, the elder caustic commentator on America's endless Imperial crusades, whose brother Patrick is one of the few free-lance investigative journalists still alive and courageously reporting from Iraq outside of the Green Zone and Baghdad's barricaded hotels, offered some sober retrospect on the war's Fourth Estate cheerleaders this last weekend in his Counterpunch Online article entitled "Where are the Laptop Bombardiers Now?". Here is an excerpt:

"But today, amid Iraq's dreadful death throes, where are the parlor warriors? Have those Iraqi exiles reconsidered their illusions, that all it would take was a brisk invasion and a new constitution, to put Iraq to rights? Have any of them, from Makiya through Hitchens to Berman and Berube had dark nights, asking themselves just how much responsibility they have for the heaps of dead in Iraq, for a plundered nation, for the American soldiers who died or were crippled in Iraq at their urging ? Sometimes I dream of them, -- Friedman, Hitchens, Berman -- like characters in a Beckett play, buried up to their necks in a rubbish dump on the edge of Baghdad, reciting their columns to each other as the local women turn over the corpses to see if one of them is her husband or her son."

For Cockburn's full article, click on this article's title orclick here

What we have precipitated in Iraq is a holocaust, a tragedy of immense proportions almost beyond belief, that our reality-challenged media has sanitized and obfuscated for four years now.